This should not surprise anyone. Most get a law degree to get big salaries and eventually end up in big companies with tons of perks.
Who wants to work in Podunk for peanuts, maybe even having to take a second job just to get by?
While cities are trying to reform their criminal-justice systems, smaller, more far-flung locales are struggling to provide basic services.
Some of this can be attributed to the use of jails as a moneymaker for rural places with few other industries. Government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, provide money for counties to build jails as a form of economic stimulus. Counties, in turn, build bigger jails. The space is used in part to house state or federal inmates in exchange for “rent.” Vera and other organizations have pointed out that jail construction isn’t a fail-safe path to economic development, especially because if jails close due to unconstitutionally poor conditions, the county is left footing the bill, which can bankrupt local governments.
But many of these rural jails house a large number of local defendants who are awaiting trial, as Keene was. According to Vera, while urban pretrial populations began to level off and then decline in the early 2000s, those populations kept growing in rural counties, eventually eclipsing urban ones. In 2013, rural counties had 265 pretrial detainees per 100,000 people, almost one-third higher than the urban rate.
Much more @ The Shocking Lack of Lawyers in Rural America